Whereas control systems within the context of automation technology ensure that operating resources are capable of being administered in such as way as to enable the desired physical processes to be implemented, Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) provide the opportunity of organizing activities performed at the control level with the aim of meeting the requirements of production in respect of quantity, quality and timely provision of the manufactured products and/or transformed materials.
Production requirements are nowadays generally generated on the basis of production planning which is determined by actual or estimated orders; this activity is normally administered by systems. The function of MES is to accept the production planning worked out in corporate systems and provide the capability for transforming this planning into the actual sequence of production steps required, which can be understood and executed by the production systems.
Successful and optimized production systems depend both of the coordination of the production activities and also on the precise control of the physical processes; the integration between the MES and the control area is thus seen by users as being a decisive factor.
Combined MES and control systems are especially of interest to system integrators (suppliers of solutions for the end users) and system owners (customers/users of the production systems).
The standards (S95, S88) developed by the Instrumentation Society of America (ISA) have contributed to the introduction of a generally accepted way of looking at the organization of control and MES systems.
Since a greater part of the development engineering effort both in MES and also in control systems consists of modeling the available operating resources (which machines, with which characteristic features, with which range of functions etc.) and the available installed base of machinery for production is the same for both types of system, the quality and the degree of integration of the MES and of the control area have a direct relationship with the ability to model operational resources and the associated functionality in an engineering environment and subsequently make the common information available and usable in the other area.
From the unpublished application with the file reference EP 04030322.4 a system and a method for exchange of application-oriented description data between projects, especially between engineering projects in the automation environment is known. It specifies an efficient and secure option for exchanging description data, especially application-oriented engineering data, between subprojects. Storage and a subsequent exchange of relevant description data of objects, of all that information which is needed for communication between subprojects, is ensured by the system and the method. The common storage of the description data is undertaken in what are known as inter-project interfaces.
A system and a method for administration and/or provision of part solutions consisting of elements is known from the unpublished application with the file reference EP 04030319.0 Existing part solutions can be reused and updated with the aid of the system and method. In this case at least one part solution is created, especially by a user, with the at least one part solution serving as a template for creation of a copy. The created part solution will be stored in a library and a copy of a stored part solution will be created. In this case the at least one copy of the part solution will be used for the creation of a solution, especially an automation solution.